Caste discrimination in some of Silicon Valley's richest tech companies

Prior related discussion with a lot of interesting comments (and a top comment with links to even more previous discussion of the issue):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24552047" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24552047</a>

Mods, already discussed here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24657737" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24657737</a>

Other discussions about this topic:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23697083" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23697083</a> (358 points&#x2F;4 months ago&#x2F;606 comments)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23798922" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23798922</a> (84 points&#x2F;3 months ago&#x2F;58 comments)

I don&#x27;t doubt this sort of discrimination happens, but is there some sort of data to suggest this is more than isolated? I&#x27;m not Indian but rather Bangladeshi (the low-caste Indians who converted to Islam to get out of the caste system, lol). And I&#x27;ve met the occasional proud Brahmin, but in decades of living here I&#x27;ve never heard of caste discrimination being some sort of systemic thing. And yet I&#x27;ve seen like dozens of articles on this all of the sudden.<p>I&#x27;m not endorsing the idea of &quot;isolated incidents&quot; in general! But you can look at data to show that disparities in how certain groups are treated--e.g. employers being less willing to call back candidates with &quot;Black&quot; names on their resume. But extrapolating from the Cisco lawsuit to a narrative about a larger problem in Silicon Valley can have ugly consequences. It can be flipped around to broadly paint Indians who are in leadership positions in Silicon Valley in a bad light.

Its a shame that people insist on dragging their prejudices halfway across the world instead of leaving them behind - just human nature I guess. Im glad there&#x27;s litigation happening now. Drag it to the surface and expose it so we can kill it. Prejudice is bad for society and bad for business. It is making decisions based on inaccurate assumptions, and its failing to value talent appropriately. It&#x27;s sacrificing competitiveness by allowing for bad decision making. Its also morally wrong, but I think the competitiveness argument is gonna be the more convincing one. Let&#x27;s leave caste in the last century where it belongs.

One of the thing that the Indian government can do to reduce this issue is to ban caste related surnames. Like you can literally tell the caste of a person from their surname. Its insane that no ruling part had the guts to ban that.<p>A large parts of population in South Indian states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala no longer have surnames that are tied to the caste. Mostly because of the people deciding to do that by themselves. But the issue is very very bad in Northern states which is where the majority of the population lives.

In recent times, I&#x27;ve seen several news stories of widespread caste discrimination in Silicon Valley, but the standard of evidence by which this is claimed seems to be poor. It&#x27;s basically asking people who claim they&#x27;ve been hurt or discriminated against. The only actual legal case in all these stories is the one against Cisco, and that&#x27;s still in progress. Of course there will be casteists among the Indians in the Bay Area (India has enormous numbers of them). But it&#x27;s not clear they have any ability to inflict discrimination on the lower castes.<p>If they do, I haven&#x27;t seen evidence of it. Stories claim that lower-caste employees have had their Indian upper caste managers discriminate, hurt their careers and even sexually harrass them, but HR departments say they can&#x27;t do anything because caste is not a protected category.<p>I work in Silicon Valley, and have a hard time with this picture of the culture and HR departments in the area.

I find the underlying question of this issue fascinating and challenging. Where is the right place to draw the line between your state&#x27;s civic values, and respect for traditions that are not strictly yours? Are you bound to honor cultural traditions that are outside your laws and norms for civic rights and presence?<p>On the one hand, the caste system is one of those things that many non-Indian people seem to be willing to come out and condemn. Frankly, it seems awful to me, and fundamentally at odds with a lot of human and civic rights norms in America.<p>At the same time, however, it&#x27;s a tradition from a society that is very different from the one in which I was raised. I don&#x27;t feel like I&#x27;m educated enough to judge it thoroughly. See also: France, and the ongoing Dialogue with Muslim communities regarding headscarves.

This seems to have gained quite a lot of popularity. I think it&#x27;s the third time I&#x27;ve seen this on the HN front page in the last month.<p>Although I find it abominable that even one person has carried their discrimination with them, I&#x27;m also surprised that this is a pattern. I&#x27;ve been in North America for about 4 years now and the only times caste has come up as a topic is westerners being curious about it.<p>Also not all Brahmins wear the thread on their shoulders and not everybody who wears it is a Brahmin, so it&#x27;s a poor test.

I&#x27;ve been around silicon valley for decades. Caste discrimination hasn&#x27;t &#x27;arrived&#x27;, it&#x27;s been there for as long as I can remember. Ask any Indian and they will tell you all about it. What they may not tell you is how hiring often is within certain ethnic demographics, also sometimes the case with eastern and central europeans.

My personal experience, admittedly anecdotal, for context: My cofounder and I have started 2 businesses together, across 11 years and I have no idea what his caste is. Of the 50+ Indians who work at our company I think I know the caste of two of them - because of a shared family last name. In my 17 years in the workforce working as an Indian with Indians in America, I have only once heard someone mention their own caste - which was to share A personal account of discrimination the previous generation of their family faced in India a few decades ago. Having said that, caste discrimination is alive and well in large pockets of ignorance in India and the larger a group of people the higher the likelihood of ignorance and bias. Given the sad history around caste in India, this is not a problem to ignore.

If US corporations actually followed the law and were held to account by a functioning government this wouldn&#x27;t be an issue. This is only an issue because EEOC is only followed when it is useful to their leftist management. Otherwise, in the name of D&amp;I, we get companies in the US mainland that are 97% Indian nationals on H1B. That can&#x27;t happen in a fully functional US corporation that is following the law where laws are enforced. So it is really pointless to point out caste discrimination when US corporations are lawless and the US government is powerless.

You know, one thing that might help us outsiders is, what actually <i>is</i> the caste system?<p>Is it based on race (skin color), lineage (surnames) or some geographical criteria (article mentioned &quot;do you swim&quot; like maybe being near the ocean means you&#x27;re better off or something)?!<p>Seriously, what are the hierarchical structures and how deep does it go.

This is to be expected. People will bring over their culture to wherever they move.<p>The only counter to this is cultural integration; however, some people will see that as cultural imperialism, or whatever other name is current.<p>The same issue is seen in Africa when new populations move into non traditional areas and bring their customs. If they are dispersed and don’t clump ala enclaves, they adopt local culture, but if they form enclaves and only hang out with others from their origin they just continue what they knew.<p>In the US so long as immigration was “stretched out” it allowed for slow integration. The speed of growth though allows for the culture migrate along with the population. That’s just how it works. An additional “phenomenon” is usually the transplanted population changes more slowly than the home population.

As a Singaporean Indian (Tamil) I&#x27;ve always found caste identity talk in the US&#x2F;India very intriguing. I&#x27;ve never heard caste mentioned here in SG; in fact I don&#x27;t even know what caste I&#x27;m from. How would one identify your caste? Can&#x27;t those from a lower caste just claim that they are brahmins?

This story and related stories seem very coordinated. Also its not &quot;richest tech companies&quot;, its just one incident at Cisco so the title of the story is really misleading. However, if anyone is found actually discriminating against an employee in terms of opportunities, I hope the law against bias gets enforced.

I am sympathetic to the cause but it seems like the Cisco incident is the only one being cited and it’s making the rounds every few weeks. Any sort of discrimination is terrible but this is getting disproportionately more attention than the other problems in the country.

This is one area I&#x27;m grateful for my own ignorance. I feel like not knowing about this system helps protect me from unconscious bias. The flipside of course is that I&#x27;m likely blind to discrimination if it&#x27;s happening around me.

There is a narrative in the comments that the British have to be burdened with the majority of the blame for the malaise of the caste system. Here is a young untouchable girl&#x27;s article in 1855 that sheds a light on the brutal oppression and subjugation that was already deeply ingrained in Indian society, and how the British introduced some balance.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forwardpress.in&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;165-years-ago-first-female-dalit-writer-wrote-about-the-grief-of-the-mangs-and-the-mahars&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forwardpress.in&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;165-years-ago-first-fema...</a><p>From the article:<p>The Mang and Mahar children never dare lodge a complaint even if the Brahman children throw stones at them and injure them seriously. They suffer silently because they know they have to go to the Brahmans’ houses to beg for the leftover food. Alas! O God! What agony this! I will burst into tears if I write more about this injustice. Because of such oppression, the merciful God has bestowed on us, this benevolent British government. Let us see how our pain has been mitigated under this government.<p>Earlier, Gokhale, Apate, Trimkaji, Andhala, Pansara, Kale, Behre, etc [all Brahman surnames], who showed their bravery by killing rats in their homes, persecuted us, not sparing even pregnant women, without any rhyme or reason. This has stopped now. Harassment and torture of Mahars and Mangs, common during the rule of Peshwas in Pune, have stopped. Now, human sacrifice for the foundation of forts and mansions has stopped – now, nobody buries us alive. Now, our population is growing in numbers. Earlier, if any Mahar or Mang wore fine clothes, they would say that only Brahmans should wear such clothes. Seen in fine clothes, we were earlier accused of stealing such clothes. Their religion was in danger of being polluted when Untouchables put clothes around their bodies; they would tie them to a tree and punish them. But, under British rule, anybody with money can buy and wear clothes. Earlier, punishment for any wrongdoing against the upper castes was to behead the guilty Untouchable— now, it has stopped. Excessive and exploitative tax has stopped. The practice of untouchability has stopped in some places. Killing has stopped on the playground. Now, we can even visit the marketplace.

Caste discrimination is even written in Mahabharata too. Do you guys think this caste discrimination in India and Indians is going away soon? I don&#x27;t think so.

Indian lived in India for many years and in the UK. Never been subjected to caste discrimination or seen it, only heard the odd jokes in Punjabi songs, Jatt ones but never seen high caste Rajputs, Brahmins etc say anything. If anything I think the problem is economic background, its always money that determines real status and that too the poorer suffer most.

It&#x27;s a fun fact not generally known that Ireland has its own Dalits: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.irishtimes.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;crime-and-law&#x2F;fire-destroys-co-galway-house-purchased-by-council-for-traveller-family-1.4342767" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.irishtimes.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;crime-and-law&#x2F;fire-destroys-...</a> .

&quot;The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it&quot; --Alan Saporta <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;0x101&#x2F;status&#x2F;1320245884680957952" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;0x101&#x2F;status&#x2F;1320245884680957952</a>

Well thankfully it is acknowledged as a problem. Caste is a big issue in India and sadly, its being carried to the US.

&gt; The case involves an all-Indian team of employees at Cisco Systems&#x27; headquarters in San Jose...<p>If the government is going to make a discrimination case, shouldn&#x27;t it be higher up the <i>equal outcome</i> ladder than caste?

I’m curious whether there’s data showing the age breakdown of the perpetrators and victims in these cases and whether the rise of Hindu nationalism contributed to an increase.

What would be the consequences for, say, a dalit who role played as a Brahmin? Tell everyone his last name is X, wear the white string things, etc?

This is shameful. I thought Indian American community had moved on from things like these. I suppose there will always be some people who do these kind of things.<p>These things are rampant in India at the time of marriages. Some parents in India emotionally blackmail their children into marrying into their own caste. Sometimes people have to marry into their own subcast.<p>(I am talking about people being forced to marry against their will and give up on love)

&gt; Sometimes they might even suggest going for a swim.<p>What do they expect to see?

This isn’t the only caste system in SV.

ORT (Only Read Title) I thought this would be about SV&#x27;s own caste system, but it&#x27;s actually about Indians&#x27; caste system.

Where did you grow up? What do your parents do? Where did you go to University?<p>It’s nothing new. It’s just not the western culture’s version.

The popularity of the Indian version is a gift of spite from the British colonial rulers before they quit the subcontinent after successfully splitting into many nations with their only strategy ‘divide and rule’.<p>I literally don’t know even one culture or country that doesn’t follow its own version of caste system. To understand it and get rid of it, we have to ask why it is able to survive.<p>I am from the sub continent. We are a billion plus people beating the same name. We have hundreds of languages. I am certainly going to ask anyone who calls themselves an Indian to figure out if they are my kin. Why? Because as an immigrant in a foreign land, I want to be friends with someone like me. I can’t be friendly to the millions of Indian immigrants.<p>I want to hang around with someone with whom I share more things Indian because I miss home sometimes. I miss the language, the food, the smells of a Hindu Brahmin kitchen and all the things that reminds me of my community. That’s not castesim. To equate this to casteism makes a mockery of the horrors and injustices of caste system.<p>No. There is no caste system amongst Indians in the Bay Area. We should ALL be grateful to be living during these times. It’s infinitely better than how our ancestors were living. It can get even better.<p>Mockery. This lawsuit makes a mockery of the ancestors of CA Dalits who have had the opportunity to step outside of the system and still engaging in this sort of manufactured divisiveness.<p>Dalits were not part of the varna system in India. The texts say that there were four castes and everyone else was considered an ‘outsider’. The word ‘Mleccha’ means outsider and that included anyone who didn’t follow the structure of society with the four castes. People with unfamiliar behaviour and different food habits. The Greeks for example were Mlecchas. The Dalits and possibly the local tribes were Mleccha too. They were excluded and when the people who formed the Hindu society became dominant, the local population were at the fringes of society but now dependent on a domainant society that rejects them.<p>India has thousands and thousands of years of history and so many migrations and invasions. It is insane to look at caste system from that framework.<p>1. Is the social structure in India problematic? Yes. 2. Is something being done to rectify it in India? Yes. 3. Does it have anything to do with indian immigrants in Silicon Valley? No.<p>The very term ‘tam-bram’ pat is offensive. Not all non Dalits are Brahmins and not all Brahmins are tamilian.<p>The state of CA is suing Cisco. That by itself goes to show that this lawsuit is politically energized and has no legs to stand on. For shame!

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hssh.journals.yorku.ca&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;hssh&#x2F;article&#x2F;download&#x2F;40067&#x2F;36268" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hssh.journals.yorku.ca&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;hssh&#x2F;article&#x2F;downlo...</a><p>Caste Confusion and Census Enumeration in Colonial India, 1871-1921<p>Pretty illuminating..about the British understanding of caste and how they conducted their census.<p>[..] Caste data also failed to meet the goals of uniformity and comparability. Most Muslims listed their caste even though they were assumed not to have one. Part of this confusion was due to enumerators not following instructions: “the enumerators must understand that they have nothing whatsoever to do with Caste Classification, this will be done afterwards by the Compilers, and, in this column, they are to enter the Caste or Class as it is given to them by, or for, each individual.”41 Another problem with knowledge of India that emerged through this process was that local colonial officials patterned their own cate- gorization on pre-existing understandings of caste, which were not nationally consistent. From these data, Waterfield could only conclude that the “caste system is perhaps as prevalent among the Mahomedans as among those pro- fessing the Hindoo religion.”42 Even Christians listed their caste, Waterfield lamented, which led him to explain that those who did list their caste must be Hindoo converts. In addition to people’s skill at manipulating the caste lists were the highly dis- 43 44 no sides in these feuds. Waterfield concluded that the main problems with caste calculations were “due partly to the intrinsic difficulties on the subject, and partly to the absence of a uniform plan of classification.”46 Commenting on the 1871 census effort, C. Elliot, Secretary to Government for the Northwestern Provinces, wrote: [T]he caste statistics are the most unsatisfactory part of the return. Greater accu- racy than before has been aimed at, and probably obtained, but still there is much error and confusion in the figures. A really scientific and sound classification is hardly possible in the face of the general ignorance of this subject which prevails among the people themselves, the frequency with which the same caste is called by different names in different places, and the tendency to confuse caste with occupa- 47 Frustrations in the first set of censuses stemmed from procedural problems compounded by the lack of suitable conceptualization. The grand expectation that colonial census commissioners would need only to collate caste data was thwarted by widespread uncertainty in India about what caste was.[..]<p>[..] There was also growing unrest concerning caste categories among India scholars and activists. By the time of India’s third national census in 1891, “many Indian political activists had become extremely census-savvy and were beginning to debate the definitions of the terms being used to describe them.”63 The fact that the census introduced new labels for various groups did not automatically transform Indian reality. There is evidence, however, to suggest that people were subscribing to census definitions and that they attached impor- tance to how they were classified. Quite often, to the irritation of enumerators, respondents would “describe themselves as anything but what they are.”64 This was the opposite of the sort of self-identification for which census planners had hoped. On this note, J. A. Baines argued in 1899 census correspondence that “I am inclined to advise the omission of caste from the Imperial schedule, and to make use of the returns of 1891 as a standard until 1911.”65 There still remained a great deal of confusion among all involved in the census project about how to classify caste. In his report on the 1891 census of India, E. Maclagan wrote, “The instructions I issued are in many parts word for word the same as those issued in 1881 . . . they were not, however, free from faults . . . the terminology was in many cases different from that of the translation issued to enumerators, and many of the superior officials were much puzzled at the inconsistencies of the two sets of orders.”66 Inefficient enumeration and lack of consensus on a definition of caste fostered more confusion. The tension between the pragmat- ics of administration on the ground and the imperial objectives of accumulating knowledge for the governance of populations led commissioners Plowden and Baines to suggest removing caste from the census.[..]

a blue wave is coming

A similar sort of thing exist at most companies in one form or another. For example, at my company some people&#x27;s opinions are valued more than others. People base their evaluation of others on communal opinion which can contain discriminatory trends. It produces a strata within the organization whether that opinion comes from a last name or heritage, or some other trait like sex, accent, philosophy, etc.

Wow, this needs to be more widely discussed. This is eye opening. I’ve definitely seen this “dance” going on between new Indian coworkers and could detect there was some shared knowledge I was missing but had no idea what it meant, what was going on, or if it was friendly or not.<p>(Especially the vegetarian question and asking if “that was out of choice or cultural”. I figured this was dog whistling to religious affiliation and felt uncomfortable about it but regrettably just stayed out of it.)<p>I want to apologize to my Indian coworkers and especially directs, that I was so naive to this. You absolutely do not deserve this kind of treatment anywhere but especially the US and immigration status really compounds this and makes this oppressive.<p>I am absolutely going to be more aware and diligent about this and raise flags when I see it going forward. Not okay. I am so sorry.